You might not expect a mailbox to have a story behind it, but most mailboxes are not the Midcentury Modern Mailbox from modbox USA. The Kickstarter-funded box was inspired from founder Greg Kelly’s frustration that there weren’t any mailboxes that complemented his newly renovated midcentury modern home. He decided to design his own mailbox, celebrating original modern mailbox designs from 1950s and 1960s.

Executed with a level of restraint and precision rarely seen outside the modern era, Kyoto's Zen Buddhist temples and gardens are as breathtaking today as they were a thousand years ago. In a new book, View, Kyoto, and gallery exhibit, Dutch visual artist and photographer Jacqueline Hassink painstakingly captures these spaces' architectural and spiritual serenity.

What do Marcel Breuer's Cesca chair, Eileen Gray's Bibendum chair, and Charles Pollock's CP Lounge have in common? It's all in the material: tubular steel. "I considered such polished and curved lines not only symbolic of our modern technology but actually to be technology," Breuer said. While wood patinas and leather cracks and ages, slick industrial steel is capable of retaining its just-new luster for decades (with a quick polish, of course). Herewith, eight examples of how to incorporate tubular steel pieces into your modern abode.